The Real Mr. Baseball?

Mr. Baseball starring Tom Selleck has long been one of my favorite movies about both baseball and Japan.  I`m not sure why that is.  As a comedy, its only somewhat funny with most of the gags being pretty obvious and I don't think I ever laughed out loud at it.  As a sports drama its not quite up there with the classics in the genre.  Still though, this is one of my faves. 

I may be biased since it was filmed in Nagoya and I live there, but I think its mostly because its just an enjoyable movie that does a decent job of simplifying differences between Japanese and American cultures. That is a delicate thing to get right without being offensive or annoying.  I sometimes compare it with Selleck`s Magnum P.I.  I love the character of Magnum, but if you ever watch an episode when they have an `Asian` guest star then you are going to see an example of how awful it can be when they get that balance wrong.  Those episodes are cringe-inducingly awful.

Another good thing about the film is that it is mostly filmed on location.  They actually went to Dragons games and filmed the fans in the stands.  Hardly any of it was shot in a studio and so you get a pretty good look at 1992 Japan in the movie, which gives it a more authentic feel than others.

Anyway, I have a baseball card in my 1987 Calbee set that features a player named `Gary` (no other name given) who bears an uncanny resemblence to Selleck`s Jack Elliot character.  Almost every detail is right.  He is wearing a Chunichi Dragons hat which has the same design as the one they wore in the film (they have since changed the logo a few times).  He has dark hair and a Magnum moustache.  Even the look in his eyes says "Yup, my girlfriend is the daughter of the manager and we went through a rough patch after I found out but, you know, its all good now."

I have no idea who Gary was, or even what his full name is.  I wonder though if his stint with the Dragons was anything like Jack Elliot's.  Did he not want to be in Japan at first, but then have a change of heart?  Did he lay down the sac bunt for the team in a clutch situation even though his instinct told him to swing away?

These questions come to me as I look at this card.  Perhaps one day we will learn the truth of the real Mr. Baseball.

My 1987 Calbee Set and the Difficulty of Collecting Japanese Cards from the 80s

Behold my partially complete set of 1987 Calbees.  It is the crown jewel of my Japanese baseball card collection and the only vintage set that I am anywhere near close to actually finishing.

Close is I guess a relative term, I have about 3/4 of them so there are still plenty to go.   I keep track of them the old fashioned way, with a hand written paper checklist that I mark off with each one I get:

I started on this quest a couple years ago when I bought a starter set of 60 different cards.  Since then I have been painstakingly tracking them down one by one, which is the only way to find them.  I love doing this because I feel it is the closest you can get to a `pure` baseball card collecting challenge these days.  There aren`t any gimmicky rare insert cards to track down, it is all just about finishing the set.  They are hard enough to find that it poses a challenge - singles pop up every now and then, usually just a handful at a time, and I have to whip out my checklist and go through them to find ones I want.  At best I might luck into 3 or 4 that I need at a time.

Fortunately despite their rarity, the prices aren`t too steep.  I pay on average between 50 and 100 yen per card, a bit more than that for some of the short printed ones (the Japanese collector term for those is レアブロック - `rare block`). 

 The 1987 set is probably the ideal vintage set to try to collect.  Unlike some of the other pre-1990 sets it doesn`t have any near-impossible to find cards (the 1989 set in contrast is notorious for those). Also the player selection is pretty good.  If you have read Robert Whiting`s You Gotta Have Wa, he wrote that shortly after 1987 so a lot of the players mentioned are in it.  That includes some former MLB stars who only played in Japan for one season like Ben Oglivie (Kintetsu Buffaloes):

 And Bob Horner with the Yakult Swallows:

In terms of condition, 1980s Calbees are very hard to find in top shape.  My set has a fair number with corner wear and other blemishes.  As I`ve mentioned before, I`m pretty flexible about condition with older cards, I just try to avoid ones with heavy creases or names written on the backs of them (which a lot of Calbee cards from the 80s have).

There is a Japanese collector who is trying to finish all the Calbee sets from the `mini card` years that lasted throughout the 1980s, right up to the 1990 set, and kept an interesting blog about it.  I thought some of what he said was interesting enough to be given an English explanation, so I thought I`d mention a few of the highlights.

According to him, the easiest sets from those years to collect are, in order:

1990 Calbee - due to its small size, they only released 55 cards that year.

1986 Calbee - There are only 250 cards in total, which is a reasonably small number, and none of them  were short printed.  The Kiyohara rookie card and Ochiai cards sell for a bit, but otherwise there aren`t any particularly expensive cards in the set.

1987 Calbee - The cards between number 76 and 100 are short printed, but they aren`t too hard to find relative to short printed cards in other sets from the 80s.  There are some parrallel cards , but he doesn`t take those into account.

The above 3 sets are the ones that collectors have the most realistic shot at being able to complete.  He also mentions the 1981 set as being only somewhat harder, with more short printed cards (201 to 250, 401 to 450), but that they can still be found, while a couple of other series (1 to 50, 150 to 199) are a bit tough to find.

In contrast he puts the 1989 Calbee set as the hardest to complete. The gold border cards from 391 to 414 are incredibly hard to find, with some people expressing mixed opinion as to whether they were eveer actually available in packs at all, or just distributed as presents to people who contacted the company.

His blog has a few other interesting bits and pieces, I might introduce some more later.  Anyway, for now I am content to just focus on my 1987 set!

Blog....ON! 2014 Baseball Card Collecting Season has Begun

 The blog is back!  As always happens in about November I tend to put my baseball card collection to the side when the season ends and distract myself over the winter months with other pursuits.  This naturally spills over into blogging about baseball cards, hence the lack of recent posts.

In about February each year though I start to get a bit antsy about things.  Sometimes in Japan you get these days in February when the climate plays tricks on you - throwing you the odd sunny day with a daytime high of about 15 degrees.  Spring weather.  It throws my internal clock completely off and makes me think of springtime activities, which ever since childhood has meant baseball.

Being too old to play baseball anymore (except maybe in a beer softball league, but there aren`t any around here that I know of), that naturally leads me to the next best thing which is my baseball card collection.

This is all just a roundabout way of saying that I have officially kicked off my 2014 collecting campaign.

 This is several weeks early for the 2014 Calbee baseball cards, which I am eagerly awaiting the appearance of on my local convenience store shelves (or stores I should say, there are about 7 convenience stores within walking distance of my place.  As I am fond of saying, we live in a very convenient location).  So for now I am satisfied to dust off my sets from years past and see what I need.

I have never actually succesfully completed a Calbee set.  I think the only sets I have ever actually completed in my life were some Topps and Donruss sets from 1989 and 1990.  Except for those I have a ton of 90-95% complete sets that I could never be bothered finishing.

The closest I am to finishing a Calbee set would be the 2009 one, which is pictured at the top of this post.  I only need 22 more of the regular cards to complete it, plus about 30 of the subset cards and inserts.  I am going to make an honest try at finishing that this year.

This 600 card box here has all my other Calbee sets from 2008 - 2013 (minus the 2009 set).   If you can do the math you will realize that means I have just over 100 cards each from those years, well fewer than half of each set.  I will try to work on those too.

One thing that I hope to avoid this year is what happened to me last year when trying to piece together the 2013 set.  When series 1 came out all of the convenience stores in my area had bags of them.  Then when series 2 came out they had them for about 2 weeks and then - poof!  They vanished.  Not just from one convenience store but from every one of them.  Even the ones near my work, which had also carried the series 1 cards, stopped carrying them.  And series 3?  I never saw a bag of them in any of my convenience stores.  The only place that I could get them at was at the big Max Value supermarket, which I hardly ever go to.  As a consequence, while I put together a lot of my 2013 series 1 set bag by bag, I only got about 4 or 5 bags of Series 2 and a grand total of 1 bag of series 3.  Much to my shame, I had to turn to Yahoo Auctions to satisfy my need for those series, which to my mind constitutes a form of cheating (though I do it all the time).

 I don`t know if that was the same in other parts of Japan or only a Nagoya thing.  In general it seems like Series 1 Calbees are usually a lot easier to find than the higher series, which is an interesting echo of how things worked in North America back in the 50s and 60s when Topps would cut down the print runs with each series as the season wore on and interest waned.  I hope Calbee doesn`t do that this year, I really enjoy being able to buy a bag of baseball card ships whenever I want to, even in September or October!

Anyway, the 2014 collecting (and blogging) year has officially begun!!

In my Mailbox: A Bunch of Calbee Baseball Cards

 I love it when something nice arrives in the mail.  Yesterday I got the above package which contained this:

 One of those Calbee Pro Yakyuu chips card holder that you can order with proofs of purchases from the bags.  Better yet though was what was inside of that:

Exactly 245 Calbee cards, crammed about 4 or 5 into each pocket!

This was an impulse purchase off of Yahoo Japan Auctions.  Every once in a while somebody will put a big lot of Calbees up with a low starting bid and I`ll usually give a bid or two to see if I can score a bargain.  Most of the time I lose but sometimes I win. 


245 cards doesn`t sound like a big lot but when you consider that this represents 245 bags of chips it actually kind of is.

The cards in there spanned the years from 2003 to 2007, with the 2005 set having the most (about half of the total).  It included a fair number of the harder to find star cards, which was really nice as often big lots of Calbees like this have those picked out.  There were quite a few from the 2004 set, including this Kenji Jojima from his Daiei days:

I don`t usually use these special Calbee albums to store my cards even though I have a few.  The main problem is simply that they are too small, you need a few of them to contain a single set. With only four cards per page they aren`t particularly space efficient either.

 I was pretty pleased with the condition of these too.  With Calbee lots you often find that a fair number of the cards are damaged.  I once got a lot of 130 cards and found that every last one of them had damage of some sort (fortunately I hadn`t paid much for it).  This lot was about 90% in the Nrmt/mt range, with only the odd few here and there with a bit of corner wear like this card of the Dragons ace closer:

These lots are a godsend for a guy like me trying to piece together older Calbee sets as the per card price works out to way less than it would have cost to buy the bags of chips they came in back in the day.  It is also a lot of fun just getting a big pile of random cards in the mail to sort through.  I`ll be taking these out of the album tonight and integrating the ones I need into my sets-in-progress for those years.

As for the doubles, if any of you out there are also piecing together Calbee sets and fancy making some trades let me know!

Just how Rare are Calbee Cards?

I was intrigued to read this article in the Asahi Shinbun last year which stated that Calbee baseball cards had cracked the 1 billion cards sold mark in 2012.

It is so rare that one gets a hard number to work with for how many cards a company produced in a given year.  This, of course, is actually a print run for 40 years but it does provide some tantalizing ways of trying to figure out how many Calbee cards were produced each year and how many might still be out there.

First it is worth noting that while 1 billion sounds like a lot it actually isn`t.  There exists no definitive answer to the question of how many cards the big US companies were cranking out each year, but the consensus seems to be that for the junk wax era they were making millions of copies of each card. Given 792 cards per Topps set, that means that a single set like the 1989 Topps set alone probably had more cards printed than Calbee has made in its entire 40 year existence.

That said I guess we can approach the numbers from the most obvious and simple direction.  If we divide that 1 billion number evenly over the 40 year history we get a print run of 25 million per year.  With roughly 18,000 Calbee cards having been issued in that time frame you get an average of 55,500 copies of each individual card. 

Of course there is a lot of variation which makes that number problematic.  First there was wide variation in the number of cards issued each year, with some of the early sets in the 1970s having more than a thousand cards while some sets from the 80s and 90s had fewer than 400.   Then we have to additionally factor in the fact that the number produced each year would have varied quite a bit.  The Asahi article notes that the 1987 set was a good seller because the Giants won the Series that year while the 2002 set didn`t sell so well due to the popularity of the World Cup that year, which Japan co-hosted with Korea.

Still though, that 55,500 number is quite low compared to American sets.  Even sets from well before the junk wax era, like the 1960 Topps set, are estimated to have had print runs about 10 times larger than that.

With cards from before the late 1990s you also have the fact that most of them haven`t survived.  Like American cards from before the late 1970s they just weren`t viewed as being worth anything and most were thrown out.  Of the few that do survive not many are in top condition.

We can get some idea of how rare Calbee cards are in comparison to vintage American cards by comparing their availability on Yahoo Auctions - the main online auction site in Japan - with the availability of early American cards on Ebay.

I did a little look at the availability of cards from the first five years of Calbee sets (1973 to 1977) on Yahoo Auction compared to the availability of cards from the first five years of Topps sets (1952 to 1956) on Ebay.  With the American ones I did this by simply doing searches (`1952 Topps`, etc) in the baseball cards section on Ebay.  I did a cut off for only cards above 10$ to weed out most of the cheaper modern repros that get improperly listed, but these numbers probably contain a few of those.  With the Japanese ones I followed the same process (`73 カルビー, etc) but I didn`t need to set a price cut off since there were so few and I could just browse through to spot any fishy looking entries

The numbers are pretty crazy:.

1952 Topps	14,794
1973 Calbee	126
1953 Topps	9,435
1974 Calbee	171
1954 Topps	8,401
1975 Calbee	252
1955 Topps	7.085
1976 Calbee	264
1956 Topps	12,662
1977 Calbee	123

As the table indicates, for every one 1973 Calbee card available on Yahoo Auction (there are virtually none available on Ebay or other auction sites I should add) there are more than 100 1952 Topps cards available on Ebay.

And, of course, the 1952 Topps set is one of the hardest post-war sets out there to complete.

When you look at complete sets available online there is a big difference too.  There are hundreds of complete or near-complete Topps sets  from the 1950s or 1960s available on Ebay at any given time (not many 1952 Topps sets mind you, but plenty from the later 50s onwards).  With Calbee on the other hand there are a grand total of zero complete sets from before the year 2000 available on Yahoo Auctions at the moment, which is pretty normal.  There are a couple of sets from more recent years like 2005 and 2007, selling for several hundred dollars and that is it.

So the bottom line is that Calbee cards, particularly the older ones, are just insanely hard to find when compared to American sets from the 1950s and 60s.  This is not surprising given the smaller size of the Japanese market, but kind of interesting nonetheless.

A Pile of 1954 Bowman and Why I Collect VG-Ex Condition Baseball Cards

I have a pretty decent sized collection of vintage (pre-1980) American baseball cards in addition to my Japanese ones.   Most of these I`ve accumulated off of Ebay over the past year or so since my interest in collecting cards was rekindled.

With vintage cards I tend to eschew higher grade cards.  My policy is to go for cards that fall into the VG-Ex range for cards prior to about 1973.  Partly this is because, especially for earlier stuff, vintage cards in Nrmt condition are just way out of my price range.

There is, however, a much more pragmatic reason for collecting old cards in VG-Ex condition, which I think can be summed up in this photograph:

Yup, that is a pile of 1954 Bowman cards in VG-Ex condition.  Note what I am doing with them.  Yes, I am actually holding them in my bare hands without any sort of plastic between my fingertips and the card surfaces whatsoever!

That is the great thing about cards in VG-Ex condition: you don`t have to be anal retentive with them.  You can pick them up, sort through them, arrange them however you want, enjoy them, even turn them over:

I haven`t looked at a Beckett`s in a while but I`m guessing the high value of this pile of 54 Bowman commons and minor stars would be about $300 or $400 in Nrmt condition.  If these were in Nrmt I would not be able to do any of those things with them.  I would just be too afraid to even touch them.  They would all be in rigid plastic holders, which are no fun to flip through at all.

VG-Ex is exactly the perfect grade if, like me, you like to handle old cards au naturel.  The corners are already a bit rounded so you don`t have to worry that any slight bump is going to cut their value in half, which is something I constatly do when I have valuable Nrmt condition cards in my hand. It is a very annoying feeling to have.  At the same time though they aren`t destroyed like cards in fair or poor (or even good)  condition are.  VG-Ex cards are generally pretty attractive to look at, without any major creases or other serious damage. 

Post-1973 (ish) it makes less sense to collect VG-Ex cards simply because there are so many higher grade cards still preserved that there isn`t much point.  But for earlier cards, why bother with all that plastic?  I keep these cards in a simple cardboard box, the way they were meant to be kept!

The Literary Offences of BBM Copywriters

One thing I like about Japanese baseball cards - and particularly BBM premium cards - is that some of them have a lot of broken English written on them for no reason whatsoever.

A few cards in my collection have some ridiculous things written on them.  It makes me like them. Like this 2006 card of Hawks reliever Takahiro Mahara:

"One of the great players has ever owned.  He will be rememberd by supporters for long years to come."

It is kind of cryptic.  One of the great players has ever owned what exactly?  Inquiring minds want to know!!

Or this Hiroki Kokubo card:

"He shines like a star at the ballpark.  He is one of the excellent players in the team.  Don`t miss his splendid ability.  He will come up to expectations of the fan."

This is a bit less grammatically confusing but the wording is so clumsy it just brings a smile to my face.  If brevity is the soul of wit then this card has no soul, but I mean that in a good way.

Lets see what this card of Yakult's Tetsuto Yamada has to say for itself:

"A new star appears in a ballpark.  He is a promising baseball player."

This one is at least completely free of grammatical errors, but is even more cryptic than the Mahara card.  Why use the indefinite article? Is Yamada this new star you speak of?  Or is it someone else? God, the suspense!